PostgreSQL Backup Strategies: Not All Backups Are Equal
A backup you can’t restore isn’t a backup. After losing data once (fortunately from a test environment), here’s the framework I apply now. The three levels of recovery Point-in-time recovery (PITR): Restore to any second in the last N days. Requires WAL archiving + base backups. Daily snapshots: Restore to yesterday’s 3am state. Simple, cheap, 24h RPO. Logical dumps: Restore specific tables or data subsets. Useful for selective recovery. Most production databases should have all three. ...